


A Path in the Forest

by StaircaseScorpius



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - Thorne & Rowling
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Book: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Compliant, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Spoilers, Hogwarts, It was time for these two to actually meet, It's optimistic okay, Loss, Loss of Parent(s), Luna Lovegood Being Luna Lovegood, Luna Lovegood is a Good Friend, POV Scorpius Malfoy, Pre-Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Scorpius gives me Luna vibes okay, Sort Of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-26
Updated: 2020-02-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:08:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22913767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StaircaseScorpius/pseuds/StaircaseScorpius
Summary: He sat, and waited, and Luna Lovegood strolled along the corridor, long, grey-blonde hair wafting behind her. She didn’t notice him until she was almost alongside him, but she hardly reacted. It was as though she’d been expecting to find him there all along.‘Hello,’ she said simply.-When Scorpius Malfoy is lonely and grieving in his third year at Hogwarts, an unexpected encounter with Luna Lovegood turns out to be exactly what he needed.(Because these two have a lot in common, and it's a crime that we never get to see them chat in canon.)
Relationships: Scorpius Malfoy & Luna Lovegood
Comments: 6
Kudos: 30





	A Path in the Forest

Thursdays were the hardest. It was the combination of double Divination in the afternoon, which always left Scorpius with too much time to think, and Albus’s absence in the evenings at chess club. He’d asked Scorpius to come with him on six separate occasions before finally giving up and accepting that he couldn’t be persuaded. Scorpius wasn’t even really sure why he’d refused, except that the thought of spending an evening trying to concentrate on chess as well as making conversation with other people was just too much to squish into the small space in his brain that wasn’t taken up by grief. 

His mum had died on a Wednesday in August, just a few minutes before midnight. Every Thursday he woke with the same heavy knowledge as he had done that first morning - that from now on, his life would be counted in weeks without her. 

This Thursday, three weeks before Christmas, he found himself hunched on a cold window-seat on the east side of the castle, where he’d wandered after dinner. He held a worn copy of _A History of Magic_ in loose hands on his lap, but it had been twenty minutes or so since he last turned a page. The corridor was quiet and almost dark, and he shivered in the cold. It was Craig Bowker’s birthday today, and the common room would be full of his friends from Slytherin and from other houses, drinking and eating and laughing. Scorpius didn’t want to witness that reminder that the world was still going on as normal when he felt as if it should have ceased turning in a hospital room at St Mungo’s in summertime. 

The faint ticking sound of his watch was the only thing keeping him company for now, and minutes dragged into hours without a single soul passing by the corridor. Until, that is, a gentle humming started to drift towards him from somewhere past the end of the hall. It could be in his head, he thought. He wondered if perhaps he was finally losing his grip on reality and if actually, that might not be the end of the world. But no, it was growing louder, and it forced him to shake himself back into consciousness, just in time to turn in the direction of the noise and see a blonde head bob into view down the corridor. 

As the figure approached, he recognised the tune she was humming - an old Celestina Warbeck song called _'Dreaming of You'_. A long-forgotten memory surfaced of his mother singing along to the radio under her breath in the kitchen at home, and for a moment he wanted to rip the castle apart brick by brick to try and excise the awful, relentless pain in his chest. But he sat, and waited, and Luna Lovegood strolled along the corridor, long, grey-blonde hair wafting behind her. She didn’t notice him until she was almost alongside him, but she hardly reacted. It was as though she’d been expecting to find him there all along. 

‘Hello,’ she said simply. 

Scorpius found that he wasn’t able to open his mouth to speak. He tried to nod politely and swallow the lump in his throat. He’d met Luna a handful of times, once at the Potters’ house - she was Albus’s sister’s namesake and godmother - and on a couple of occasions in Diagon Alley. He’d read all about her role in the wizarding wars, but he’d never really spoken to her. 

Right now, she looked down at him with an expression of mild bemusement. ‘It’s alright,’ she said with a hint of a shrug, ‘You don’t need to talk if you don’t want to. Would you mind very much if I sat here for a while?’ She gestured to the space next to him on the window-seat and Scorpius shook his head quickly. 

She perched on the seat next to Scorpius and gazed around at the paintings on the wall opposite, the shadows thrown by the torches on the ancient stone pillars. 

‘I’m Luna, by the way,’ she said after a minute or so, turning to face him. 

Scorpius made a monumental effort to shake himself out of his silence. ‘I know,’ he mumbled eventually, ‘I’m Scorpius. Scorpius Malfoy.’

‘I can see that.’ Luna gave him a smile, and reached down to pick up the battered old bag at her side, pulling it up onto her lap. She lifted the flap, dug inside for a few moments, and pulled out a handful of colourfully-wrapped sweets, offering them to Scorpius. Despite himself, he took one with a mumbled ‘thank you’. 

‘I’ve been visiting Neville Longbottom,’ Luna began again in her soft, lilting voice, ‘You probably call him Professor, of course. We were at school together.’ 

There was a pause, but it didn’t feel like she was waiting for him to speak. 

‘I was at school with your Dad too, and your mum.’ More words hung in the air, not needing to be spoken aloud. Scorpius had braced himself for the final word in the sentence, but somehow it hadn’t sliced through his heart the way it usually did. 

Luna unwrapped a sweet for herself, then dropped the rest back in her bag and started to roll a strand of her long hair between her fingers. ‘It’s horrible isn’t it, to lose your mother.’

Scorpius looked at her for a second, at the handmade bracelets that crowded her wrist and the strange-looking glasses on a chain around her neck and the smile lines at the corners of her eyes. She looked as though she belonged to a slightly different world than everybody else he knew. He could understand why his dad wouldn’t have been her friend in school, but there was something about her, something about the air she carried close to her, that seemed to still the relentless swirl of thoughts in his mind and blanket them with calm. 

‘Yes,’ he ventured after realising he hadn’t actually answered her question, although he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to. ‘It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. But I feel… I feel like I should have prepared.’ 

Luna blinked a couple of times, twisting her hair and squinting at a portrait of a sleeping wizard on the wall opposite. ‘I think that even when you know what might happen in the future, actually living it is quite different.’ She spoke matter-of-factly, but her tone was the very opposite of harsh. ‘My mum died when I was nine. I remember feeling like we’d been walking in a forest together, and then suddenly she disappeared and I was all alone, and because she’d been guiding the way, I didn’t know how to get out. There was no path, you see. Just me, lost in all the trees.’

The lump in Scorpius’s throat had reappeared, and he scolded himself internally for getting sad over a silly story about some trees. But another voice in his mind urged him to keep talking. 

‘I don’t like being around everyone else, sometimes,’ he said quietly, ‘It’s not that people don’t care, or don’t understand, but they… carry on.’ He wasn’t sure if he was making any sense. 

‘Mmm. Their world hasn’t changed,’ Luna said, and Scorpius knew that she understood. ‘They’re on the other side of a line that you’ve now crossed.’

The words were coming easier now. ‘And I can still talk to them, and sometimes it’s alright, but…’ He tailed off.

‘But it’s harder. All the ordinary things.’

Scorpius nodded and Luna fell silent. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d talked to a grown-up this freely. Or anyone, really, apart from perhaps Albus. And Albus did his best, but he couldn’t always understand. A question was welling up inside him, waiting to be asked, even though he didn’t think he really wanted to know the answer. 

After a few minutes of calm silence, he took a deep breath and spoke. ‘Does it get easier?’

Luna leaned her head a little to one side, and clasped her hands together on top of her bag. ‘No, but it gets less.’ 

‘I don’t understand,’ Scorpius said quietly, feeling tears starting to gather at the corners of his eyes and willing them away. 

Luna looked down from the portraits then, her big grey eyes meeting Scorpius’s without the slightest trace of judgement or condescension. ‘It never gets easy,’ she said, her voice warm, ‘It will always be part of you, I think, but as you get older, all the other parts of you grow. And they take up more space, and the horrible sad part has less room compared to everything else. It won’t always feel like it’s the only thing you can feel.’

The tears were threatening to fall now, and Scorpius didn’t think he could speak. Luna smiled down at him, and in spite of all the awful, raw, stinging grief inside him, there was also something lighter there, something that felt like hope. He reached up with one hand to wipe away the moisture at his eyes, and Luna moved too - looping one arm around him and patting him softly on the shoulder. She was the opposite of Astoria in so many ways, and he barely knew her really, but the child inside Scorpius who had wanted nothing but a hug from his mum for the last one hundred and eight days couldn’t hold out any longer. He leaned against her shoulder and stopped trying to stay stoic, and sobbed. 

It could have been minutes or hours, Scorpius wasn’t really sure, but when the tears finally started to slow, he sat up and wiped at his face with the cuffs of his jumper. Luna didn’t seem bothered at all by the sudden display of emotion from this strange boy she’d happened upon in a corridor, and Scorpius didn’t know to express how grateful he was for that. 

‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled as he straightened. 

‘Don’t be,’ Luna said immediately, in her sing-song voice, ‘I thought as soon as I saw you that you needed someone to listen. It’s quite alright.’ 

Scorpius got the feeling that his eyes were probably very red and puffy, and his voice was still decidedly wobbly when he spoke. ‘But you don’t know me.’

‘Well, the world would be an odd sort of place if we only ever listened to people we already knew well, wouldn’t it?’ Luna said, thoughtful. ‘I’m afraid I will have to leave quite soon, because I’ve got some new baby bowtruckles at home who need fresh woodlice every two hours. But I’m very glad I had the opportunity to meet you, Scorpius.’

Scorpius sniffed. ‘I’m glad I got to meet you too, although I don’t think I’ve been very good company.’

Luna shrugged good-naturedly. ‘There’s lots of ways to be good company.’ She stood up, swinging her scruffy bag over her shoulder and sticking out her hand. Scorpius wiped at his eyes one last time and stood up to shake it. 

‘Your mother seemed like a very strong kind of person,’ Luna said as she released Scorpius’s hand, ‘And I think she would be very proud of you. You can be sad and strong at the same time.’ She held his gaze for a second or two more, then smiled and turned away. Scorpius stood and watched her walk back down the corridor, seeming almost to float, and as she disappeared through the arched entranceway he could hear her faint humming once again. 

The hall was still dark, and cold, and Scorpius looked down at the window-seat, at his book which sat open at the end of a chapter. He checked his watch and saw that it was only half past eight. He’d planned to be here for another hour at least, regardless of interruptions, but his gaze returned to the end of the corridor in the direction Luna had left, and he thought to himself. He might be lost in his own forest right now, but perhaps if he kept walking, he might find a path. 

He leaned down to close his book, scooped it up alongside his bag, and set off down the corridor, the flickering torches dancing in his wake. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! This is an idea I've been idly thinking about for ages because Scorpius and Luna have always had a strange kind of connection in my mind, and I knew I had to get it down in words at some point! I feel like I'm always apologising for angst, but this is the optimistic kind, I think? So sorry, but also not sorry. 
> 
> I always love reading your comments, or you can find me on Twitter & Tumblr @trolleybitch 💜


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